aadler | Reading

Despite the madcap wildfire of a year this has been, Emily still gets a birthday.

And it's the first day of winter, which means that thanks to her, the days are going to get longer.

Emily doesn't particularly like to get her picture taken (okay, I don't either), but I grab one, now and then. For instance, when she has a dog on her lap, and can't get away. She's an animal lover, so if I ever want her to stop for a second all I have to do is throw one in front of her. Definitely a good personality trait.

She's made a few mistakes in her life. She married me, for instance, and I moved her up to a place that has real winters. On the other hand, she embraces hot days the way I embrace chocolate, which I wouldn't do on hot days.

She's a good sport. I mean, she doesn't usually have to be, since we share so many of the same interests. Still, as I alluded to above, she's not fond of cameras, but still comes out with me to places where they may be taken.

I can't begin to tell you how much I love it when we read together; watch history, science, or obscure documentary shows; do the tourist things at places that have in their names words like "forest", "cliffs", "state park", "trails" or "lake shore". I love geeking out with her about science and science fiction. And, well, I love her.

I know I've said this before, but I really don't know how I would have made it this far without Emily. Not just with our books, which she's largely responsible for, but with just keeping me going in general. She has her head together when I don't. She's tough when I'm not. She fixes things I can't--and I mean that both figuratively and literally. The other day she fixed our bathroom sink. I kicked it. Kicking didn't help.

My plan for a birthday gift crashed and burned this year, but I did get her cheesecake! (And a different gift to come later.) So happy birthday, Emily, and thank you for bringing back the longer days.

You can buy one of our books to celebrate Emily’s birthday! And read it, too.

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Another day older is another day better, at least until you hit your 50s.

snickfic

This is the year-end category where I'm least likely to want to change my answers in the next week and a half, lol, so here we go.

Favorite new songs/albums of the year
- Cosmic Selector Vol. 1 by Lord Huron. Great vibes, a great progression, only one skip (“Digging Up the Past”). Dreamy and sad, suffused with existential horror, just weird enough both lyrically and musically. I wasn’t sure what I wanted from the new album, but this was exactly it. “Who Laughs Last” is probably my song of the year.

- Mayhem by Lady Gaga. When you're sixteen years into your career and can make a banger album like that this fits right in with your classics!!! The first six or seven songs in particular are an amazing run. “Perfect Celebrity” is probably my favorite, but it’s hard to choose.

- All the live tracks from the Oasis tour. I think this is the first officially released live version of Bring It On Down ever, and Wonderwall is the best live version since… idk, the one from Knebworth 1996 maybe? Or maybe ever? And this live version of Slide Away has finally brought me around on that song. Incredible stuff. (Full live tour album when???)

- "Van Horn" by Saint Motel. One of those songs I didn't really appreciate until I heard it live. Great fun. Also a couple of songs off their new album from the spring (as opposed to their new album for the fall).

- New Candys, which I stumbled across on Bandcamp. I got hooked on their single "Regicide", and the accompanying album The Uncanny Extravaganza is ideal "drowning out external noise" work music.

- All That We Imagine Is the Light, the new Garbage album. Some of the writing is a little dodgy, honestly, but the vibe is great. No Gods No Masters is still my favorite, though.

Disappointments
- I wish I liked Miley's new album more than I do. The tracks I like best are mostly her doing Lady Gaga, and that's not really what I go to Miley for.

- I discovered Dorothy Martin of the band Dorothy has gone full born-again Christian and is now giving interviews about spiritual warfare and the like. Bummer. We'll always have ROCKISDEAD, I guess.

Favorite new-to-me songs/albums
- This year I got really into the Monnow Valley and Sawmills versions of Definitely Maybe, which were released for the 30th anniversary last year. In some ways I like them better than the official album, or at least they've made me appreciate the official album more. Sad Song with young Liam on vocals is incredible, and I’m sad the official version left out that great electric guitar (bass?) hook.

- At the beginning of the year I had a month or so of listening almost exclusively to Doechii (mostly Alligator Bites Never Heal) and GloRilla (mostly Glorious and Anyways, Life's Great). Good times. TGIF is an all-timer.

Stuff I was really into for a hot minute and/or that I want to explore further
- Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo through their collab album In the Earth Again. I love the contrast of the menacing electric guitars and Pedigo's contemplative, melancholy acoustic.

- Ethel Cain, maybe? Or maybe I just like “Tempest” a lot.

- The singles from Charli XCX’s upcoming Wuthering Heights-themed album. Brat didn’t do anything for me, but these are very much my jam. I love when a pop artist goes weird, like she does on “House.” My most anticipated release of 2026.

- That new Rosalia album. I think I need to spend more time with it to fully appreciate it. “Berghain” is a hell of a track, though.

- Jonah Kagen, mostly that single “God Needs the Devil,” which is exactly the kind of rootsy bitterness I like sometimes. However, his full album later in the year gave me bad politics vibes, always a hazard with Americana and country artists, so I don’t know that I’ll explore him further.

Some other favorite tracks from this year
“Problems” by Yonaka. That last bit leading into the chorus for the first time!! Gives me shivers.
“The Fate of Ophelia” by Taylor Swift. This song is NONSENSE but it’s so catchy.
“Lucky” by Renee Rapp from the Now You See Me 3 soundtrack. A classic bop. Apparently it didn’t even chart, which surprises me, but the charts were wacky this year.
“Song for Henry” by Loren Kramer from the soundtrack for On Swift Horses. You know, the angsty heartbreaker song playing over Julius and Henry’s first sex scene.

Old Favorites - stuff I already loved and continued to listen to a bunch in 2025.
Kendrick Lamar! His Super Bowl show reignited all my enthusiasm. I watched that thing so many times. This coincided with my Doechii/Glorilla phase at the beginning of th eyear.

Miley Cyrus's older stuff, especially her 2023 album Endless Summer Vacation. I’d have said Plastic Hearts was the one I really loved, and yet at this point I think I’ve actually listened to ESV more times. I guess maybe it’s the right mood for more situations than Plastic Hearts. It kind of wears down towards the end, and I find the last two songs unlistenable, but until that point it’s a basically flawless execution of the thing it’s choosing to be.

Oasis, lol. They were my top artist of the year yet again. Mostly the Definitely Maybe anniversary release and the live tracks, as mentioned above, but also according to Tidal I listened to the Knebworth 1996 live album a lot. I don’t even remember this.

Best lines - New or old, on their own or combined with the music:
- I got a burning feeling deep inside of me / And don’t know where to put it (“Who Laughs Last” by Lord Huron)

- You said you really don’t dream anymore (“Life is Strange” by Lord Huron)

…I probably just need to do a whole post about this album, huh. Does anyone else here listen to them?

pattrose

This is a handmade throw quilt by a friend of mine. This is even prettier in person. I just love it. The back is minky material. So soft and comfortable. Click on the picture and you'll see the larger version.

snickfic

Movies: the nocturnal edition, I guess!

Silent Night Deadly Night (2025). A nice young man who sometimes puts on a Santa suit and murders naughty people as directed by the voice in his head meets a nice young woman who sometimes really loses her temper.

This was a delight. I had the BEST time. It's a remake of a 1980s slasher I haven't seen, but the premise of that one sounds like it's played straight as a "guy in a santa suit goes on a psychotic killing spree" kind of thing, and this one is a lot more complicated/enjoyably weird in its execution. The lore of this movie is absolutely bananas, just total nonsense, but is never overexplained, which it seems like is where so many of these kinds of bonkers movies fall down. The script is surprisingly smart overall, I felt, with a lot of care and affection for its characters. It doesn't hurt that I adore Ruby Modine, who previously had smaller parts in Happy Death Day (the roommate) and Satanic Panic (the daughter). And the ending is *chef's kiss*. I would watch the hell out of a sequel that follows what happens next.

On a personal note, as someone who loves Christmastime but has had less opportunity/excuse to indulge in it as I've gotten older, I really enjoyed the over the top Christmas theming of this.

It does have a couple of awkward lines about gender(tm), which maybe are trying to do a thing, but do not succeed in my opinion. There's also an incident with a white supremecist which would have felt more successful if we'd seen, like, a single non-white person by that point in the movie. The movie also does not look great; it's kind of all sludge. Oh well, we can't have everything.

I think this movie is already almost out of theaters. If it sounds fun to you at all, I would absolutely recommend chasing it down for some Christmas-flavored horror cheese.

--

100 Nights of Hero (2025). In a misogynistic dystopia, a young married woman (Maika Monroe) whose inattentive husband is away on business must cope with a would-be suitor (Nicholas Galitzine) with the help of her maid and best friend (Emma Corrin).

I checked this out because the descriptions I saw were sending gay signals, and indeed, this is very gay! Monroe and Corrin's respectively repressed and hidden gay longing is great. It also, unlike the movie above, is beautiful and stylish, even though they were clearly working with a fairly small budget. The aesthetics are top-notch. And Galitzine (of Red, White, and Royal Blue, among other things) does a great job playing a hot himbo whose sense of menace is undercut by how dumb he is.

Unfortunately, the actual story a) is not my kind of thing and b) IMO sucks pretty hard on its own merits. If I had realized quite how much of a satirical fable it was, I would not have gone to see it. This takes place in a universe where women are killed for such sins as literacy, extramarital sex, and not getting pregnant within nine months or so of getting married. This last one is the key for our sad wife Cherry, whose husband and the villain of the piece simply declines to have sex with her, even when the local Puritan-flavored but fictionally religious order says she'll be executed if she doesn't hurry up and get pregnant.

I do get that we're trying to critique men's control of women's bodies, but like... this is not a scenario that has widespread analogue in the real world. Men refusing to have sex with women, even when the women's lives are at stake, is not a thing! RL misogyny is bad enough, you don't have to make shit up! The fact that it's suggested (but not confirmed) that the husband is either gay or ace makes it worse, as he's the only possibly queer man in the movie, and it makes it much much much worse that he's also played by the only actor of Middle Eastern descent that I noticed. In fact I think he's also the only character of color still alive at the end of the movie; all the various women of color have died. (Including Charli XCX's character, who along with her two sisters is executed for knowing how to read.)

This movie makes the Barbie movie look subtle. I would say I don't know who it's for, but apparently it's for the other five or so people on bluesky who've seen it, all of whom gave it gushing reviews. IDK man.

snickfic

[ART] Night of the Red Sands, The Divine Cities Series - Robert Jackson Bennett. A gorgeous, dramatic painting as described in the novel. Can be appreciated canon-blind!

You're Gonna Need A Softer World, Jaws, A Softer World remixes. Every one of these is hilarious and absolutely spot-on.

Do Automatons Dream of Albino Eels?, Sunless Sea/Citizen Sleeper, gen, 6k. A zee-captain finds a mechanical stowaway and must decide what to do with it. I'm not familiar with the Citizen Sleeper, but the crossover character fits really naturally into the Fallen London universe. Great atmosphere all the way through, so many deliciously horrible little bits of worldbuilding flavor, and a satisfying arc of the stowaway automaton and the crew learning to care for one another.

fix it (how can you fix it?), BtVS, Spike/Buffy, 3k. Buffy's soulmark signifies that her soulmate died before she was even born. I really enjoyed the extra details of soulmate worldbuilding this added, and if Spike and Buffy were soulmates, I could definitely see it going exactly like this. <3

The Beat Goes On, At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie, 6.6k, gen. The scandal at Bertram's Hotel is a major news story—apparently too major for Beatrice to be trusted with it according to her editors, even though she's always been the one to cover stories about Lady Sedgewick. A very cool timestamp featuring an OC I loved immediately, a female reporter trying to make it in a man's world, and doing whatever she needs to to get the story, including going back home to visit little old Miss Marple. IMO you don't need to remember the novel to enjoy this (because I did not remember it, lol).

pattrose

Do you believe this is December weather. It's usually cold by now. This is unreal. Our orange trees are blooming like cfrazy. Click on it for larger version.

ozma914

As months go by and seasons change

We watch the outside rearrange

Nature knows a change is due,

And it’s not hard to see a clue

Like puppies frozen to a tree

While going out to take a pee;

Digging mammals, shivering bucks,

Will all soon know that winter sucks.

At first we think it’s not too bad.

We’ll tell ourselves we won’t be sad,

As plant life dies and smart birds flee

And utilities charge a higher fee.

So-called dumb beasts burrow down

To spent all winter in the ground

And never see the frigid season –

Who would want to? There’s no reason.

The deer that ran all summer, free

Look to the future, and when they see

The coming winter, run their hide

In front of cars: deer suicide.

"You just wait 'til November."

The people who have earned their pensions

Have long made known their full intentions

To head down south, and send postcards

From Florida, still in green yards.

They’re wearing sandals with white socks

Or maybe out-there Birkenstocks

While pink flamingos’ flag their grass

They tell the winter, “Kiss my butt!”

But we the workers must stay there

Where all is froze, from toes to hair

With no more comfort than to say

At least we’re not Canuks today.

Because it’s true, or so we hear

Our weather’s not the worst to bear:

The Weather Channel made some calls

And featured International Falls.

Just finish covering me with snow and leave me until spring.

Not one bit better do we feel

As we suffer through this bitter pill.

It’s bad enough to feel this pain,

To make it worse, we can’t complain!

And so we skate across the lots

While searching for our parking slots

More fender benders as we slide

From one curb to the other side.

We get the after-crash advice

To let it go, or else the price

Of our insurance hits the roof,

Or just gets canceled, and goes poof.

On that we have to take a pass –

We need our cash to pay the gas.

The meter spins at higher speeds

To meet the frozen public’s needs

For someplace warm to thaw our toes

And that’s not outside, Heaven knows.

Nor can our car’s heat melt the ice --

The price of fuel has risen twice

Just since we got home from our work,

Which took an hour, ‘cause some jerk

In an SUV, (thought he could do his thing)

Crashed in a ditch and caused a scene.

It may be true four wheel drive’s nice,

But doesn’t do a thing on ice

Especially when the guy inside

Has little brains, but lots of pride

And somehow thinks that he’s immune

To weather you don’t see in June.

And driving like a maniac,

He puts his truck up on its back.

Which leads the rest of us, quite snidely

To laugh at his misfortune widely.

Despite the danger that, down the road

It might be us who ends up snowed.

Once Christmas goes, there’s nothing new

For we poor Hoosiers to look forward to

Just slushy ground and blackened trees

And snow that comes up to our knees,

Ah, but then March arrives.

The end’s in sight, so we surmise.

We start to feel, and with good reason,

That we survived another season.

It’s true, the roads are covered now

With melted ice that no snow plow

Can get removed, but it’s just brief.

Besides, the thawing brings relief

From frostbit skin and higher bills,

And moods so dark that only pills

Could bring us through more rounds of snows

Without our family coming to blows.

Sometimes it doesn't pay to get off the porch.

But wait! Just as we regain our reason

Comes basketball playoff season.

The high school teams roam far and wide

And bring back temps that rip our hides.

How is it that the final games

Can bring us so much weather pain?

With snow and sleet and wind and ice,

And other crap that’s just not nice.

The groundhog may have said we’d get

An early end to this, and yet

As long as we have basketball

There’ll be an ice storm ‘fore the fall.

Spring is never early, though.

It will arrive and then we’ll know

We have some time to smile and thaw

Until the heat waves bakes us raw.

So it goes in the Hoosier state:

There’s always something new to hate.

You can get books delivered, so check us out here:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Nobody ever crashed into a ditch while reading a book at home.

Current Mood: cold
Current Location: Hell (Michigan)
Current Music: Cold Miser

snickfic

All Systems Red (2017) by Martha Wells. A humanoid cyborg created to do wet work jobs finds itself giving a shit about a human research team it's supposed to be protecting on an alien planet.

I can see why people love Murderbot itself; it's a big old angst bucket desperately trying to pretend it isn't one. I've seen people characterize this type as an iron woobie, and it's fandom catnip.

However, I did not connect with any other part of this novella. It's so damn insubstantial. There are other characters, but they're mostly indistinguishable. There's a strong whiff of claustrophobic found family that made me DNF the one Becky Chambers book I tried, with the same element of "the one character who doesn't buy in without question is treated as an antagonist." There's some worldbuilding, but extremely thinly drawn. The prose is conversational, which can work great in a lot of cases but here just feels like one more missed opportunity to give me anything I might be interested in.

I've read a lot of pro SFF novellas over the years, and I genuinely can't think of one that felt less deserving of its length than this one. You can pack a lot of thoughts and ideas into a novella! But this didn't even try. If it'd been a third of the wordcount, I probably would have liked it pretty well.

I've heard the second and third in the series are the best, and I might try them at some point, but tbh I think I'd have better luck with the show, which at least has real actors to lend some weight and complexity to the characters.

--

The Tainted Cup (2024) and A Drop of Corruption (2025) by Robert Jackson Bennett. The first two books of his Shadow of the Leviathan series, a Sherlock and Holmes riff (or possibly a Nero Wolfe and Archie riff) about an idiosyncratic middle-aged(?) female savant and her long-suffering young gay assistant solving murders in a fantasy world where basically all technology is organic in some way.

These were great fun. Bennett seems really into both cosmic horror (the "leviathans" of the series are mountain-sized monsters that crawl out of the sea and wreak havoc every wet season) and body horror (more terrible plant-related things happening to bodies than you can shake a stick at). Even when this world is running the way everyone wants, it's still so damn weird (complimentary). Augmentations that turn your skin purple and gray! Immortality treatments that stop aging and cause you to just grow forever, like an iguana! The augurs in the second book who pattern-match to such a degree that they can't handle spoken communication: A++, and they reminded me a bit of parts of Anathem.

Ana Dolabra, the foul-mouthed savant detective is far and away the best part. Her assistant Din Kol, from whose perspective the stories are written, is a real sad sack, both due to circumstances and apparently innate temperament, and sometimes that can be a bit of a drag. I also felt like his renewal of purpose in A Drop of Corruption came way too easily; it almost felt like it happened off screen.

Overall, though, these are just a great time. It sounds like Bennett is on a roll, and I can't wait for the next one.

snickfic

Dust Bunny (2025). A little girl hires a hit man (Mads Mikkelsen) who lives across the hall to kill a monster under her bed. Or, Roald Dahl meets John Wick.

This is listed as a "horror thriller," which I guess is true in the same sense that the Barbie movie is a "political drama." I would be more inclined to call this a dark fantasy/action movie. It's also rated R, and I legitimately do not know why; this is like a mid-tier PG-13. I kept waiting for things to get gory and justify the rating, and they never did, so I recommend managing your expectations on that front.

The aesthetic here goes extremely hard. Their apartment building is an absolutely incredible art nouveau confection. We visit other locales with similarly heightened decor, but honestly nothing is nearly as visually stunning, which I think is fine, because the apartment building is the heart of the movie.

The acting here is all extremely good. In addition to Mikkelsen and the child actress, who is fantastic, we also have Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, and someone I didn't know named Sheila Atim who is delightful.

This is fun ride and great time. I spent most of the movie having absolutely no idea where it would go next. If any of this piques your interest, I definitely recommend it.

--

Wicked: For Good (2025). First, props, the subtitling is clever. Anyway, this is the second half of the story of a good witch and a bad witch fighting/collaborating with the machine while pining for each other and also some guy who's just kind of there.

Honestly, "just kind of there" describes a lot of this movie. It doesn't really expand on any of the political motivation from the first movie, so I had trouble remembering exactly WHY the wizard and his henchwoman have decided to demonize the animals and by extension their defender Elphaba. Fiyero the awkward third wheel, whom I actually found quite charming in the first movie, got almost nothing to do here. No animal character got any kind of significant development; the closest we got was one of the flying monkeys, who didn't even get any lines for plot reasons. There's a subplot involving Elphaba's disabled sister becoming increasingly more unhinged and embittered by her romantic disappointment and probably ableist society at large, but then, you know, she dies from a house falling on her, so that's the end of that. There's a Big Reveal about Elphaba's parentage that literally everyone saw coming, but which Elphaba herself doesn't even get to find out about or react to. There are barely even any big musical set pieces and basically no dance choreography at all. The only song that made a real impression on me was Elphaba's big heel turn song No Good Deed, and I hear from the theater folks that it was kind of weaksauce compared to the live musical version.

All that said, this is the Elphaba and Glinda show, and they're great, honestly. Ariana Grande's comic timing is impeccable. The pining truly is spectacular; there's an amazing scene towards the end that must be seen to be believed. The shippers feasted.

ozma914

Who wants a free e-book for Christmas? That's right: You do!

So from now until the end of January 1st you can get Coming Attractions on e-book for free. Zero. Zilch. No cost. And that's a 99 percent price cut!

I think 99%. I became a writer because I hate math.

The catch: It's part of the Smashwords 2025 End of Year Sale, which means, let's face it, that you have to get it on Smashwords. That would follow.

You can find the promo here: https://smashwords.com/shelves/promos starting, um, now. This is also a great chance to get the books of other authors, free or at a promotional discount (after you get mine).

If you want to go directly to my account (and who wouldn't?), it's at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914.

You can get Coming Attractions (or the two anthologies I'm in) on epub, mobi, and pdf formats, or as an original document, so it should be readable to anyone with an e-reader, cell phone, or computer. The print version, sadly, is not part of the promotion.

This is indie author paradise, and indie authors could always use the help. So please, check it out and share the promo with your friends and family, and anyone looking for their next favorite book. And don't forget to review (pretty please).

Happy reading!

Treat yourself! And if you feel guilty treating yourself for free, you can find our other books all over:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: A free book rarely costs any money at all.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Location: Smashwords
Current Music: Free Falling

snickfic

The Sorcerer and the Shadow, Cthulhu Mythos, Original Miskatonic Student/Original Sorcerer, 3k. Nathaniel Palfrey seeks a sorcerer's aid. Ambrose Corbin is more than happy to oblige. A twisty, nasty little horror story, full of layers. Really captures that menace Lovecraft's villains have while also being a literal gay seduction story. You love to see it. :')

HousesuoH, House of Leaves, 7k. Pre-canon horror fic about a contractor who agrees to do a renovation project on the house and really, really regrets it. This author has correctly identified the missing quarter-inch as the best/worst part of the whole book and has expanded on it. What a fun little horror story.

Yggdrasil Station: A 1-day Wormhole Hopper's guide!, Original Work, gen, 2.6k. Join interstellar travel blogger 1DAYWORMHOLEHOPPER as she guides you through the unique attractions of the one-time backwater Yggdrasil station! A delightfully terrible little story/blog/transcript of a cheerful vlogger trying out the gourmet dining experience of a meal prepared from a bodymodded human tree. Must be read to be believed. The author absolutely nails the voice of this particular genre of media.

pattrose

For the last five years I have a CT Scan done of my lungs every November. I have a very small nodule that they have been watching. I had it done two weeks ago and doctor said its worrisome. It changed in size. Something it's never done. He said first of all he wants an echocardiogram of my heart to be sure it's strong enough for a procedure to be done. They need a biopsy from my lung. They go down your throat and into the lung with a robot device. Sounded interesting but I'm really scared. You see I'm on oxygen 24 hours a day. He said they would watch me like a hawk and they do this surgery a lot. I'm nervous but I trust him. My daughter told me she doesn't want me to do it because she thinks something will happen to me. But the doctor said I really need the biopsy. Just writing this out, has helped. I think I'll do it if my heart doctor says it's a go. Hubby says he trusts the doctor also. It won't be till later after Christmas. I don't want to worry anyone over the holidays. Oh, by the way, I'm 73 years old if that matters. 😁❤️

pattrose

I have a great friend named Beverly. She is 89 years old. 8 weeks ago she fell and fractured her pelvis. She’s been in a rehab since she got out of hospital. This rehab is a terrible place. It's a glorified nursing home. She lives with her daughter Vicki and is having a countdown to when she gets out. I'm going to stay with her three days a week while Vicki works. I just love Beverly, so, I don't mind at all. She's been in. A wheelchair since this happened and I told her the doctor said there is no reason for her to be in a wheelchair. I've got lots of work to do so she'll be in shape again. I know she's depressed. Believe me that place is so depressing. I went to see her every day since this happened. She would light up when I got there. Thankfully she has another friend that comes every day also. In the summertime we swim three days a week. Does anyone have suggestions for me to get her more motivated? Anything would be helpful. I need to get her out of the funk she's in. She gets to go home tomorrow. Oh she’ll have PT right away at home. Three times a week. Thanks to anyone reading while I rambled.

snickfic

ficinabox reveals have happened, and after being a post-deadline pinch hit (and then a post-post-deadline pinch hit...) and being a little nervous about it, I got some great things. :3 More recs to come once I get a chance to explore the rest of the collection.

i said farewell (i meant don't go), Red Sonja (2025), Sonja/Petra, 7k. Petra survives the arena, goes traveling with Sonja after the end of the movie, and absolute does not pine or have any feelings about it (and then gets abducted by an eldritch cult, oh no). Jaded traumatized warrior women/young earnest warrior woman, what an excellent ship. :') The writing here is gorgeous, and the fic hits that good tropey goodness in a way that can be hard to find in femslash.

Probably readable canon-blind? If this sounds like your jam at all, I definitely recommend. This fandom is SO SMALL that the tag is unwrangled on AO3, and I worry that no one but me is going to find this fic and read it.

The Lonely Ones, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth/Alexis Rigby pre-slash, 5k. One misterable stormy night, Alexis appears on Booth's doorstep, to their mutual surprise. This is the first fic for this ship longer than a drabble, and I am so delighted it exists. The writing is really delicate and lovely, and very careful, as it needs to be when writing Booth making new personal connections (whether he wants or not).

Reflections, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth/Ratcliffe, 3k. Despite his best intentions, Ratcliffe loses touch with Booth and then starts to form some suspicions about why that might be. I love this premise of Booth being a kind of liminal being as well, which fits right in with some of the ways Monette treats time and setting in canon. A nice shippy little ghost(?) story.

On All My Motions

“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” – C.S. Lewis

Reading

Happy Birthday, Emily

2025 in review: music

(no subject)

Movies: Silent Night Deadly Night, 100 Nights of Hero

more FIAB recs

Our weather for next week.

An Ode to Odious Winter

Books: Murderbot, Shadow of the Leviathan

movies: Wicked 2, Dust Bunny

Coming Attractions and anthologies Free On Smashwords

fic recs: horror from FIAB

Had a disappointing doctors appt today

My friend Beverly.

FIAB fics!